Wednesday, May 28, 2014

The Western Nighthawk's First Writer

When
DC's anthology Western
Comics gains a new cover feature
with
Pow-Wow Smith in #43 (Jan-Feb/1954), Julius Schwartz has
become editor.
As on his other books he records payments to writers and artists, and
he inherits, to some extent, Jack Schiff's payment records for the
title; thus there are more extensive Western
writer credits in the Grand Comics Database than you might have
expected. The
surviving records don't, unfortunately, extend all the way back to #1.

Masked and double-identitied Nighthawk took over the slot of the
similar Vigilante with #5 (and missed #6). Western
5 came out
in the
same month as DC's
Dale Evans Comics,
where writer Joe Millard's best-known DC work, the Sierra Smith back-up
strip (not to mention his Dale Evans stories) begins. Millard's run on
Nighthawk coincides, as it happens, with Charles Paris's run of pencils
and
inks on the feature.

The incidence of "Eeeeow" led me to Millard as the author on these. For another thing, he begins a few balloons per story with
"Gulp!", a habit that Gardner Fox and Don Cameron, soon Western's
go-to authors, don't have. Millard's exclamatory
captions are reminiscent of Otto Binder's.

These are all of Millard's Nighthawk stories. I can see that #13 and
14's are by a single author, although one I can't put a name to; an
Alan Brennan is known from the Who's
Who to have written Nighthawk in
1950, so take that as you will. In another few issues Cameron and
Fox write their first Nighthawks.

Nighthawk in Western
Comics
Scripts by Joe Millard
Art by Charles Paris